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  4. Utf-8 symbols in the Title or Meta Description?

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Utf-8 symbols in the Title or Meta Description?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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  • Yosef
    Yosef last edited by May 13, 2015, 6:33 AM

    Has somebody any experience (pros or cons) to using utf-8 symbols in the Title or in the Meta Description tags?
    Expedia uses it:
    http://prntscr.com/74ofrv

    74ofrv

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Dr-Pete
      Dr-Pete Staff last edited by May 19, 2015, 8:07 AM May 18, 2015, 3:10 PM

      Google is officially supporting some emoticons. I talked to one big-brand SEO last week who has tested it with a fair degree of success. A couple of warnings:

      (1) Testing the impact on one title tag is a fair amount of work, so it really has to be a high-impact SERP. This isn't something you want to spend days on across thousands of results.

      (2) Make sure the character/symbol really is relevant. People focus on the first two words of a headline, and that emoticon may well take the place of one of those words, so make it count. I wouldn't do this just because you can.

      (3) Not all characters render properly on all OSs and devices. Make sure to test.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • Yosef
        Yosef last edited by May 13, 2015, 7:45 AM May 13, 2015, 7:45 AM

        Thanks for your Answer Ikkie, but my question was especially about using "utf-8 symbols in the Title/Meta tags".
        Should I use, or not?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Mustansar
          Mustansar last edited by May 13, 2015, 7:37 AM May 13, 2015, 7:37 AM

          that there are no real pros or cons in where you place the TITLE element within the HTML document’s HEAD area. However, although this is nothing whatsoever to do with SEO, I do remember reading that in an HTML document, the best practise is to include the TITLE after the first META tag that declares the content-type and/or charset value(s), e.g.:

           <code><title>[Placeholder Title]</title>
          
            […]</code> 
          

          (I am fairly certain that this technique is stated somewhere in the W3C Recommendation, HTML 4.01 Specification, in the section "The global structure of an HTML document" ( …but if I would double-check this.) Although I think the technical reason was to ensure titles that contain HTML entities that need to be escaped should always declare a character set before you provide the actual text, it still makes you think: is source-ordering important?

          At the very least, it is conventional wisdom to always place the content you want to gain the most exposure in terms of SEO/the search-engines' results pages (SERPS) higher up in the web pages (X)HTML source code (e.g. in a website without any META description tags set, the first paragraph in the document will probably be the one chosen to represent that webpage’s description in its SERP listing, not the second or third etc., etc.) Ultimately, I would say that you certainly have nothing to lose in placing this TITLE (or any content) higher.

          You can also see the guidelines for this on the MOZ blog link here

          https://moz.com/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website

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